Transitions

News flash: transitions are timed. That's right—they are part of the race. Even those who are keen to finish near the top of the standings often lose more time in transition than they should. And for the rest of us: while improving transitions might not get us onto the podium, still, we are there to perform to our potential, right? So let's bring our transitions up to their potential!

There are many things to consider in speeding up transitions, and we will get to those below, but in my opinion one is more important than all others: attitude. Coming out of the swim, or off of the bike, the body and mind quite naturally go into ‘relaxation mode’. You just completed a hard effort. Why not take a breather? Answer: the race is not over! If ever there were a time to remember that triathlon is a single sport and not three sports pasted together (‘buffered’ from one another by transitions), this is it. We must remember that even during the transitions, we are racing. Adopt that attitude during transitions and I bet you'll take substantial time off your transitions right away. Now let’s move on to the finer points.

One note of caution: The details as I describe them below are what I believe to be ‘best practices’ in transition. It is entirely possible that some of these recommendations will not work out for you. Figure out what works best for you—i.e., what will result in the overall best race performances for you—and do that. But don’t give up on the recommendations here just because they don’t work once. In general, they should provide the fastest transitions for you. Only abandon them if, after some practice, you still are convinced that something else works better.

Transitions 101

Let’s start with the basics. Getting the basics right will account for the vast majority of your time saved in transition. Once you’ve got them down, you can starting honing a few other skills to shave the final few seconds. Our focus here is on non-Ironman races. Much of what we say here applies to IM races as well, but in those races, adding or removing clothing in particular is more likely to be worth the time. In most other races, it is not.

Make It Easy

The fundamental principle you should never abandon in transition is to make your transition as easy as possible. There are two parts to making it easy: keep it simple, and practice.

Keep it Simple: A messy, complicated, cluttered, transition area is an invitation to confusion. You will already be slightly disoriented when you get out of the water. Do you really need to arrive at your bike to be confronted with this?

Don’t let your transition area look like this!
(Image originally from this thread.)

Now quick, while wet and disoriented, grab just what you need from this mess. And unless you are first out of the water, there’s a decent chance that somebody else—indeed, many somebody else’s—have run past this spot. Would you blame them if they accidentally kicked something here?

Contrast that transition set-up with this one:

Simplicity = time saved.
(Image originally from this thread.)

Yes, believe it or not, that simple and clean setup has everything needed to get through T1 and T2. There little chance that this transition area will get disturbed, and even if it does, there is so little clutter, that the shoes and race belt (which is under the shoes) will still be easy to spot and grab. Simplicity. It works. (This setup does include one advanced technique—shoes already clipped into the bike. If you forego that technique, still the only additional piece of gear on the ground will be the bike shoes.)

The other aspect of making transitions easy is practice. Your routine in transition needs to be automatic. It can be a confusing, hectic, place, and if you feel unsure, you will lose time. If you practice, it will become automatic. Practice is easy. You can work it into your regular workouts. For T1 practice, go all the way at least a few times. Put on your wetsuit (if your target race is possibly wetsuit-legal), hop in the shower and get wet. (Even better, if possible, go for an open-water swim!) Have your ‘T1’ all set up, and go for it. Make a note of which parts were slower. Fix the little things that cause hiccups.

Keep it simple, and practice. The rest is fine print. Now let’s look at the fine print.

T1: Swim to Bike

Before the race, practice running from the swim exit to your bike. Make sure you are familiar with the optimal route to your spot on the racks. Very often there are numbers at the end of the racks indicating where your bike should be. Don’t rely on these numbers. Pausing to read them while running, especially during the bout of disorientation you are likely to feel after the swim, will slow you down. Instead, find some landmarks to guide your way, and count the number of racks you’ll pass to get to your bike. For example, ‘fifth rack on the left after the Port-a-Potty’. Do not rely on easily moved or removed landmarks, such as balloons attached to a rack or brightly colored transition bags, and the like. These are easily (and often!) moved or removed by athletes or race officials.

Next, when you are done warming up, get your bike into the gear you’ll need to start the race. Typically, this will be quite a low gear, so that you are spinning rather than mashing at the start. Spinning will help you get up to speed more quickly, and will give you better control of the bike. Now you’re ready. (We’ll talk about where stuff goes below.)

As soon as you are out of the water (or running through it rather than swimming), take your cap and goggles off. Start taking your wetsuit off while you are running to the bike. To begin, grab the zipper and pull it down as you run into T1, then pull off the top. You finish your run into T1 with the wetsuit down to your waist. When you get to your bike, peel the suit down your legs (you are turning it inside-out as it comes off), then step on one leg and pull the other leg out. Then do the same with the other leg. Do not sit down! You can accomplish this task while standing up. This procedure is worth practicing several times. Once you have it down, you should be able to pull your wetsuit off (from the waist down) in 10 seconds or less.

Next are your sunglasses (if you are wearing them) and helmet, which should be on your bike. If the helmet does not balance securely on your handlebars, then just hang it by a strap. The sunglasses should be in your helmet. Put them on first, and then the helmet. Don’t forget to connect the strap! You can be penalized for handling your bike with the chin strap not secured. Finally, put on your shoes, and grab your bike, which is best racked on the seat if at all possible. (If it is racked on the seat, then you will be facing the direction that you will be running as you pull the bike off the rack. Otherwise, you’ll be facing the wrong way when you pull the bike off.) Grab it by the stem or the seat, and run (run!) to the mount line.

When you get across the mount line, it might be worth stepping to one side or the other. This is a call you’ll have to make in the moment, depending on traffic. You do not want to be mounting immediately behind someone. If that person has trouble mounting, you might end up having to take evasive action to avoid a collision, so make sure you have a clear path ahead when you mount. Get on your bike in your normal way (we’ll discuss the alternative—the ‘flying mount’—below). And don’t be a weaver! After you mount, go straight, and watch out for others who might weave. Practicing your bike handling skills so that you have full control of your bike even at low speeds can be very useful in these few moments at the mount line. Don’t believe me? Watch this video.

What about socks? If you can avoid wearing them, do so. Putting on socks takes time. Time spent in T1 is time lost. Even if you plan to wear socks on the run, my advice is to wait and put them on in T2? Why? Because your feet are likely to be somewhat drier in T2, and the socks will be easier (= faster) to put on. In any case, if you must put on socks in transition, put them, rolled up and ready to roll on, inside your shoes. (That way, if the shoes get bumped somewhere, the socks go with them, and your gear is less likely to get scattered into different places.)

How do you know whether you’ll need socks? Practice! If your bike shoes fit, you should be able to go sockless. If you develop hot spots or blisters, it could be the shoes, or it could be that you just need to acclimate to the shoes. Practice! Ride sockless as much as you can and it is likely to get better. Some people have luck with strategically placed Vaseline, or Body Glide, or chamois cream, in the shoe. Some people have luck with baby power in the shoe. Experiment and see what works for you.

What about washing your feet? Don’t! There is no need to wash feet, even if you just ran through sand. Putting buckets of water, cloths, and other such paraphernalia in your transition area is just asking for trouble. Keep it simple! At most you should use a towel on the ground, and just rub your feet on it as if it were a rug. But really, you should be able to brush any dirt or sand off with your hand as you put your shoes on. If it becomes a problem while biking (honestly though, I’ve run through plenty of grimy and sandy transition areas and never had a problem), you can always remove your foot later, while riding, and brush it off. You can do this, right? Of course you can, because you’ve practiced it.

Here’s how it looks when you put it all together.

T2: Bike to Run

The fastest transitions are those where you do as little as possible while standing still. When you are standing at the rack, you are not making progress towards the finish line. That is why you should remove your shoes while you are still riding. It is easy to do—anybody can learn how to do it. When you are about a quarter mile from the finish (this distance depends on terrain and traffic), on a reasonably straight stretch of road, reach down and unstrap one shoe. As soon as the strap is undone, move it away from the crank—we don’t want it to get caught up in the crank. This task is most easily accomplished by simply re-attaching a little bit of the strap on the outside of the shoe. It looks like this:

Strap secured and out of the way.

With practice, unstrapping should take literally a second. Work your foot out. Once off, the shoe will want to hang down heel first. Catch the toe box of the shoe with your toe, and rotate it back to horizontal (ideally before it ever gets all the way down). Put your foot on top of the shoe—you are now using the shoe as a platform pedal. Do the same with the other foot. The pictures below illustrate the sequence.

  
  

Removing the shoe. (Sorry about the messy background!)

Slow down and dismount before the dismount line. Grab your bike by the handlebars if you must, but preferably by the seat, and run (run!) to your spot on the rack. Just as for the swim-to-bike transition, practice this run before the race. Pick out your landmarks and know where to go.

When you get to the rack, rack the bike on the handlebars. Turning it around to rack it on the seat just adds time and there’s no need for it at this point. Put on your shoes. (If you absolutely, positively, must wear socks, then of course put them on before the shoes. It is easiest and quickest, in general, to have them rolled down to the toe box. Slide your toes in and roll them up over the rest of your foot.) You will want to have ‘lock laces’ (sometimes called ‘speed laces’, sold under various brand names) on your shoes. They are elastic laces that allow you to pull the shoe on (and off) without tying.  Do not sit down for any of this; you should be able to put shoes (and socks) on while standing up.  If not, then practice it.

Now grab your run belt (to which your number is attached). It should have been sitting on the ground, under your shoes. (They will help pin it down.) In case you don’t know, a run belt is just an elastic belt to which you can easily attach a race number. Some of them also have elastic loops to attach gels, or small pockets to hold whatever else you might need on the run. If you are wearing a cap, it goes under your shoes with the belt, and you grab it as well. Do not pause to put the belt and cap on at your rack! You have everything you need. Start running! You can put the belt and cap on while you are running.

Here’s how it looks when you put it all together.

What About All My Other Stuff?

There are many things that we bring to transition that we either don’t, or very likely won’t, need during a race. For example, I wear contacts when I race, but I pack a spare pair of glasses just in case I lose them during the swim. (It hasn’t happened yet...knock on wood.) We probably carried lots of other things into the transition area—spare goggles, Body Glide, sunscreen, clothing for after the race, and so on. What do we do with them?

These items should be in a bag (whatever bag we used to carry them in the first place—a backpack or small gym bag work well, but if you want a dedicated transition bag, there are some nice ones out there), and placed out of the way. In some areas, there is room under or beside the rack—just be sure that your bag isn’t intruding on someone else’s space. In others, you will need to store these items somewhere near the edge of the transition area, for example near the fence. I have yet to encounter a transition area where there is not some reasonable place to store this bag out of everybody’s way, while still making it available should I need it during the race.

Advanced Techniques

If you manage to master everything above, you will already be one of the fastest in transition in your race. I guarantee it. Look at any race results, and take note of the wide range of transition times. Those differences have very little to do with athletic prowess, and almost everything to do with being prepared and executing well. Now you’re ready to eke out those last few seconds. I’m going to cover three advanced techniques, in order of difficulty (for most people).

Shoes on Bike

If your shoes are already mounted on your bike, you get to skip one step while standing at the rack. Remember that anything you can do while moving is better done moving rather than standing at the rack. Of course, that’s assuming that you can do it efficiently while moving. Efficiency requires practice. Here’s how to do it.

First, the preparation. You need to get your shoes in position so that when you jump onto the bike, you can immediately put your feet on top of the shoes and start pedaling. Attach a thin rubber band (some experimentation will be required here) to the shoe—most shoes have a loop on the back to which you can attach the rubber band (thread the rubber band through the loop and then back through itself). On the left side of the bike, you can attach it to the quick-release lever on the rear wheel. Doing so, with the cranks parallel to the ground, should hold the shoe parallel to the ground, ready for your foot. Do the same on the right side. You’ll need to find something relatively secure to hold the rubber band. The front derailleur works well on my bike. Experiment. Here’s how it looks on my bike:

    

Shoes secured to the bike.

OK, now we’re ready. Once you get onto the bike, put your feet on the pedals (you do not have to do the flying mount described below to use this technique). Next, get it up to speed. (The rubber bands will break as soon as you start pedaling. You know that they will because you practiced this with the same type of rubber bands. You did practice it, right? Good.) Let me repeat that: Do not attempt to put your feet into the shoes until you are up to speed. You need momentum, and clearance from the madness at the mount line, before you can easily hold your line and focus for a moment on your shoes. Once you are safely holding your line, with good momentum, reach down and grab the loop at the heel of the shoe to hold the shoe open, and put your foot in.

Congratulations. If you did everything efficiently, you just saved a few seconds in transition.

Flying Dismount

The flying dismount will allow you to carry some momentum from the bike into an immediate run into T2. You and your bike will never come to a full stop during dismount. You begin just as described above by taking your feet out of the shoes. (You cannot do the flying dismount without taking your feet out of the shoes.)

The next step may be easier on one side rather than the other. I’ll describe how I do it. You may find it easier to switch left and right. When it comes time to dismount (before the dismount line!), stand up with your left pedal all the way down (and, of course, the right pedal all the way up), and take your right leg foot of the pedal. Pull it over the bike and between your left leg and the bike so that your right leg is between your left leg and the bike, and your right foot is slightly in front of the left pedal. You are preparing to hop off the bike with your right foot hitting the ground first.

Slow down, but don’t stop. When you hop off the bike (in front of the dismount line, right?), your right foot hits first and your momentum immediately carries you into a run. Be careful that your right foot hits the ground far enough away from the bike that you do not slam the left pedal or crank into the back of your right foot. Ouch!

Your shoes are, clearly, not held off the ground by rubber bands as they were leaving T1, so hold on to your bike tightly, especially at first. It is easy for a pedal (usually the left one since it is all the way down when you jump off) to get hung up on the ground, which will cause the bike to hop. If you have a firm grasp, this will not be a problem. My strategy is to keep one hand (my left) on the bar, and the other moves immediately back to the seat. If there’s a problem immediately after I hop off, I can easily control the bike as I’ve got two hands on it. Once I’m running smoothly (which typically takes just a few strides), I release my left hand and hold the bike by the seat only.

So how much should you slow down? Ideally, you slow down just to the speed you will be running with the bike and no more. Judging this speed, especially taking into account any safety considerations arising from the setup of T2 or from any other cyclists who are around, takes practice. Indeed, the entire technique described above takes practice. Fortunately, you have plenty of opportunities to do so. Every time you get home from a ride, dismount in this fashion and when it comes time for race day, you’ll be ready.

Have a look at the end of the video below. This guy does a pretty decent flying dismount (but on the opposite side of the bike to what I described). My one criticism is that he should reach back and grab the seat with his left hand to secure the bike, in case a shoe strikes the ground.

Flying Mount

The video above also shoes a pretty decent rudimentary flying mount. The flying mount is the most difficult of these advanced techniques, and arguably the one that has the least impact on your total time, and the most potential for the opposite effect, should you botch it. Don’t try it in a race until you are 100% certain that you can do it smoothly, even with obstacles such as weaving (or crashing) cyclists nearby, clueless spectators wandering into the mount area, rain, mud in your eye. You get the picture.

I’ll describe the technique shown in the video above first. As you can see, just before mounting, he gets both of his hands on the bars. He then puts his right (outside) foot on the right (nearside) pedal, which, notice, has been secured so that it is parallel to the ground and forward, ready for his foot. Then simply stand up on that pedal—the crank will turn 90°. Pull your left leg over the seat, sit down, and you are away. That initial 90° turn of the crank should give you some decent momentum to get going.

A potentially slightly (and I do mean slightly) faster technique is to hop right onto the bike immediately. Your inside leg hits the saddle first. (Don’t land right on your groin or you will regret it!) Then you quickly slide down onto the saddle, quickly putting both feet on the pedals. The video below shows it being done pretty well by Ain-Alar Juhanson at Ironman Lanzarote in 2008. He cuts it pretty close, but notice that he does, barely, land on the inside of his leg, and not on his groin.

Again, a botched flying mount will cost you much more time than simply doing a normal mount at the start line. Make sure that you can do it in your sleep before doing it in a race.

The Take-Home

• Attitude: Doing well at a triathlon includes doing well at transitions, regardless of your ambitions. They are part of the event, not a break from it!
• Keep it simple. Put only what you need in your transition area. You need very little. The rest can go in a bag that is available but not in the way.
• Practice. Amateurs practice until they get it right. Pros practice until they cannot get it wrong. Everyone can be a pro at transitions.
• Review the T1 and T2 summaries, above, for the finer points.
• Don't try the advanced techniques until you have absolutely mastered everything else. Most of your time saved will come from that mastery.

Hi Guys !

Sorry I have not been around for the last week here in the forum, rest assured my training blog has atleast been maintained.

Excellent piece on Transition Michael, thanks v much, i 1st scanned it and looked at the 1st Transition pic and then the 2nd and laughed out loud, my initial thoughts of the 1st pic were, wow thats tidy, what the heck is there and then looking at the 2nd pic inside my brain i went ............. aaahhhhh !!!!! lol !!

I hope your gran gets better soon.

Things have been manic for me over the past week or so with work and family problems, (grandparents health also), and to top it off my achilles gave uop on me 3 miles into a 9 miler run home from work, so training suffered last week and i wont be able to run this week but can bike so plan to clock 5 x 20 mile turbo sessions instead. (i like having targets)

I hope your all well and hopefully will be more active this week,

T